Thursday, January 21, 2010

Generation Hex

According to Wikipedia my generation, Generation X, is the one that reverses the trend, the generation that does worse (by 12%) than the one preceding it.
I'd feel badly about this, except I never truly gave a fuck about the almighty dollar. Yeah, the fact that my 12 year old retirement account has nearly exactly the same amount of money in it as it had when I started it? Sucks. Thanks to George W. Bush and his 3 (THREE!!!!!) market crashes in 8 years.
But I figure I'll figure it out. After all, Gen X-ers statistically hold the highest level of education, right? Okay, maybe that's not everything. But we are the generation largely responsible for GNU/Linux so I'm pretty sure that money is both not our main interest, nor something that is actually necessary. After all, an entire operating system for free? Why worry.
We are, in fact, the generation that currently keeps the world from sucking.
Oh, and why is Paul McCartney bare-foot on the cover of Abbey Road? I don’t give a fuck.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Conan Gets Paid

Looks like Conan will get paid
Okay, I know what with the earthquake in Haiti, and any number of pressing humanitarian tragedies going on right now, a white guy getting paid 40 million dollars to quit his job is well, kinda insignificant. But I think Conan is funny. And I also think he's getting shafted by his employer, the only difference between him and me in this regard is he has a contract that ensures his employer will pay handsomely for the privilege of screwing him, whereas I, in the "right to work" (snort) state of PA, lacking representation by a proper union or Civil Servant designation, can be fired for either a) no good reason, or b) no reason at all.
Without any cause, whatsoever. In fact, a previous employer of mine went so far as to _make_stuff_up to cover their own incompetent identity-thieving screw-ups and attempted to fire me in the process. I kept my job, but lost some dignity. And some money. I kept working there, mostly because I liked the folks I worked with, and I enjoyed the job, but a small part of me stayed long enough to vest my pension, so the company some day would have to pay me back for what they tried to do.
Unions get vilified in the press a lot these days (who do a lot of pundits blame for the failure of GM and Chrysler) and no doubt they are not without blame, but stupid CEOs and upper management (hellooooo, NBC? Anyone Home?) are just as much if not more so to blame. No one vilified the cost of paying U.A.W. salaries when the U.S. Automakers were making large profits on SUVs, but when short-sighted management got caught with there pants on the groundand no small, high-quality fuel-efficient cars when gas went to $4.00 a gallon, suddenly the evil Unions were to blame.
As if the Union were responsible for the allocation of R&D dollars, Engineering resources, and "next-quarter" instead of "next 10 or 20 years" planning for the future allocations done by the boardroom.
Right, blame the folks tasked with assembling and selling a shitty product, not the folks in charge of it being a piece of shit to begin with.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Goodnight, Teddy

59 years old, left too soon. I drive by the spot where his Rolls Royce crashed on Lincoln Drive here in Philly from time to time. It always made me a little sad when I wasn't white-knuckled on the wheel (it's a truly horrible and dangerous road) but now it will feel even more melancholy.
RIP, Teddy. You were a musical hero to this Suburban Philly kid, blasting out of the center speaker on the AM radio.

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Request a song

I love that my favorite band has a section on their web site to request a song at the concert you are attending. Maybe they are just acknowledging that some of us don't have the pipes to shout out "Freebird!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" from the back row anymore. Or maybe they actually want to hear what songs their fans are requesting. Either way, it's pretty cool.
Now if the show in Philly wasn't already sold out. . . Eff me for not checking email until I got home.

Monday, January 04, 2010

How much does that T-Shirt really cost?

This article gives a pretty damning list of the "costs" of a cheap cotton t-shirt. The scariest part of the entire article? Walmart and Kmart account for 25% of all clothing sold in the US. It's not scary because of the market power they wield, it's scary because of what it says about our fashion choices here in the US.